But what if you want to survive your first encounter with an armed thief?

They forgot to go to Troy Hurtubise, with his Trojan Armor Suit. It may look silly, but if it kept you alive, I don't think you'd mind looking a little silly. And I'm sure it could be repainted to look a little more... serious.

Huh... his 'God Light' seems kindof out there, but if it's real that would be mighty useful in addition to that ARP trainer. I wonder what sort of effect it would have on a normally healthy individual... or if the supposedly increased cell regeneration would let someone recover from a workout and grow stronger, faster.

Dracofrost wrote:Huh... his 'God Light' seems kindof out there, but if it's real that would be mighty useful in addition to that ARP trainer. I wonder what sort of effect it would have on a normally healthy individual... or if the supposedly increased cell regeneration would let someone recover from a workout and grow stronger, faster.

Ultimately, though, you're not going to gain respect in the scientific community by offering to pay people thousands of dollars if they can disprove what you've said - you gain respect by subjecting your work to peer review - you gain respect when other people are able to reproduce your results. And maybe it's just me, but after having read the article, it just doesn't sound like this guy is trying to do that.

Apparently they've gotten a lot further with robotic exoskeletons. The next version will be powered by a turbine and carry enough fuel to operate continuously for 24 hours... pretty cool. Powered armor, here I come. Add in some Dragon Skin armor Now just add some 'russian rocket boots' to it, but scaled up, and you've practically got yourself Heinlein powered armor with jump jets.

And if you deployed with something derived from this, and handled pickup with the V-22 Osprey, you'd practically have Starship Troopers (the book, not that travesty that calls itself a movie) right there. Especially if you armed them with one of these. Then it'd really be complete. And I'm sure that the suit could handle hauling around complete NBC protection along with armor that's proof against most small arms. And there you have it, Starship Troopers (or at least Starcraft style Terran Marines). Yep... fun stuff.

If turning one-person into a superhuman requires the same kind of investment as a B-2 Spirit does... well, we may only ever have 21 superhumans in our military, heh (that's how many B-2 Spirits were built, according to wikipedia.org)

Well, currently the HAL-5 suit produced by Cyberdyne in Japan is going for around $50,000. Even assuming tripling of the cost, that's $150,000, plus about $5000 for a standard set of DragonSkin. Now, assuming that you want and can get a heavier, fuller coverage version and that also triples out, that would be $15,000 for the armor portion. Russian Rocket boots sell for about $1000. Again, assuming scaling up arbitrarily triples cost, that's $3000 dollars for the boot portion.

This totals the system at $168,000, certainly not cheap, but considering the median lifetime cost of a soldier today is 4 million, assuming this significantly increased capabilities and decreased casualties, I'd say that would make for a very justifiable investment. Of course, given the way government military spending goes, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the suits ended up costing more like a million dollars. Still, cheaper than a fighter jet. These would have specialized uses, too, so they'd most likely be used by a small group of special forces or Rangers, which are even more expensive to train and maintain, but worth it in their disproportionate ability to get the job done.